Greatly Exaggerated

Sunday, April 2, 2017

Re When local news outlets shutter due to cuts, we all lose
(April 1):

Elizabeth Renzetti quotes as follows from the Public Policy Forum’s
recent report The Shattered Mirror. “Since 2010, there have been 225 weekly and
27 daily newspapers lost to closure or merger.” This does not accord with my
research or with data gathered by Newspapers Canada, which show that the number
of non-daily newspapers actually rose by 18 from 2011 to 2016. The number of
paid daily newspapers, which I study closely, has fallen by eight since 2010.
Six of those closures or mergers were by two B.C. chains that have been buying,
selling, and even trading newspapers back and forth, then often closing them to
reduce competition. The recently-closed Surrey Leader is the 20th newspaper
lost since 2010 as a result of these dealings by Glacier Media and Black Press.
The federal Competition Bureau seems not to have noticed.

Monday, February 6, 2017

A report on Canada’s
troubled news media released by the Public Policy Forum recently – titled The Shattered Mirror – extends the reflective analogy used by Senator Keith Davey’s
study of mass media in 1970. “In the decades since Senator Davey declared the
media mirror ‘uncertain,’ it has cracked and now appears shattered,” states the
think tank headed by former journalist Edward Greenspon, which was hired by the
Heritage committee studying Media and Local Communities. Yet the PPF report is more
like a funhouse mirror that grossly distorts reality in at least one key media industry.
Not only does it buy into the Big Lie that has surrounded newspapers for years
– that they are losing money and thus dying – the report seemingly does its
best to promote that myth. It repeats the canard that industry dominant
Postmedia Network is bleeding red ink by mentioning that the company lost $352 million
in its fiscal year ended last August 31. That’s only if you deduct a $367
million “impairment” charge that reflects the reduced value of Postmedia’s
business on paper, plus a raft of other extraordinary expenses such as the $42
million cost of severing staff. Otherwise, on a cash-in/cash-out basis, Postmedia
recorded operating earnings of $82 million on revenues of $877 million for a profit
margin of 9.3 percent, which sure beats buying bonds. What really dragged it
down, however, was the $72 million in interest payments the company had to make
on debt bizarrely held mostly by its U.S.
hedge fund owners. That piece of financial engineering more than anything is necessitating
Postmedia’s constant staff cuts and thus diminishing Canadian journalism.

The PPF report is silent on the problem of U.S.
hedge funds owning Canada’s
largest newspaper company, which was inexplicably allowed by the erstwhile
Harper government despite a supposed 25-percent limit on foreign ownership.
Postmedia then bought 175 of the 178 newspapers owned by Sun Media, Canada’s
second-largest newspaper company. That gave it both dailies in Vancouver,
Calgary, Edmonton
and Ottawa, but the Competition
Bureau let the purchase stand because it somehow concluded those newspapers
didn’t compete anyway. Postmedia then merged the newsrooms of its duopoly
dailies in all four cities despite promising not to, effectively eliminating
daily newspaper competition there. The PPF report gives the Competition Bureau
a pass, noting only that it was “caught by surprise” by Postmedia’s broken
promises. The company’s dominance might not be apparent in Toronto,
where its Sun and National Post have competition from the Star and Globe &
Mail. In the three westernmost provinces, however, it has a stranglehold with 75
percent of paid daily circulation and eight of the nine largest dailies. We
wouldn’t be in this situation if Ottawa
enforced our foreign ownership and competition laws.

The report further perpetuates the newspaper death myth by pointing
out that six Canadian dailies were closed, merged or changed publication
frequency in 2016. Can you name them? I had to look it up. Most would guess the
Guelph Mercury, which was shuttered a year ago to some consternation. The other
five were small town dailies in B.C. and Alberta,
only one of which was actually closed. Four of them were owned by the B.C.
chains Black Press and Glacier Media, which have been carving up the province’s
community press between themselves unhindered for years. The chains have been
playing a real-life game of Monopoly since 2010, buying, selling and even trading
newspapers back and forth and then often closing them to reduce competition.
Black and Glacier have closed 19 of the newspapers they have exchanged,
including non-dailies. More than half of the 15 newspapers the chains traded in
one 2014 deal were subsequently shuttered. Of the seven paid circulation
dailies that have died in Canada
this decade through closure or merger (not lived on with a change in publication
frequency), six were killed by Black or Glacier. As a result, Black Press (no
connection to Conrad Black) now owns all but one of the newspapers on Vancouver
Island, which is the size and population of New
Brunswick. Has the Competition Bureau even noticed?

But my favorite part of the report is where the PPF predicts
that newspaper sales will fall to only two per 100 households by 2025, down from
18 in 2015 and 49 in 1995. How it came up with that projection, other than by
using a lead weight, is beyond me. So ardently does the PPF promote the
newspaper death myth that the heading for this section screams “THE END MAY BE
IN SIGHT.” That may accord with the popular misconception, and with what the
late American media critic Ben Bagdikian called the “myth of newspaper
poverty,” which publishers on both sides of the border have promoted for
decades to their great regulatory benefit. It doesn’t accord with financial facts,
however, which I detail in my 2014 book Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of theDeath of Newspapers. Their revenues have undeniably fallen off a cliff in
recent years, but my research shows that no publicly-traded newspaper company in
the U.S. or Canada
suffered an annual loss on an operating basis between 2006 and 2013. That period
included their steepest revenue declines ever during the Great Recession of
2008-09. Newspapers will survive as long as they remain profitable, which they
show an uncanny ability to do. That’s because they are remarkably adaptable organizations
and are able to make themselves smaller in short order, unfortunately by mostly
throwing people overboard. This has weakened their journalism and endangered our
democracy. We need digital media to pick up the slack, but they find it hard to
compete for advertising revenue with Google and Facebook.

The PPF report makes some interesting suggestions for measures
to breathe life into Canada’s
flagging news media. Changes to the country’s antiquated laws on charitable
giving are badly needed to allow non-profit news media outlets to accept
tax-deductible donations, as they can in the U.S.
and other countries. The report’s suggestion of taxing Canadian companies that
advertise with the American digital giants, then using the proceeds to subsidize
Canadian news media, may be realistic depending on how it is done. Let’s hope
that Greenspon and his researchers are better informed in those areas than they
are on newspaper economics.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Ken Goldstein dropped by the Poynter Institute recently. Who
knows what he was doing in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Maybe he was on vacation. After all, it’s c-c-cold this time of year in Winnipeg,
where Goldstein lives. Or maybe he was there at the behest of a client. His
firm Communic@tions Management Inc., according to its website“provides consulting advice in media economics, media
trends, and the impact of new technologies on the media.” FULL
DISCLOSURE: Goldstein and I have locked horns before, on the letters page of
the Vancouver Sun way back in 2002. He was then executive
vice-president and chief strategy officer of Canwest Global Communications,
which owned the Sun and most of the other major dailies in Canada.
That was before its leadership ran Canwest into bankruptcy, forcing Goldstein
to hang out his shingle as a consultant. Back then my complaint was about a Sun column Goldstein wrote headlined “Newspapers’ dwindling role belies fears about
monopolies,” in which he argued that Canwest’s overweening influence was
nothing to worry about. You can see from the correspondence that Goldstein made sure he got
the last word back then. That won’t happen now that I have a blog.

Ken Goldstein -- Canada's media "expert"

Down in St. Petersburg,
Goldstein got the ear of Rick Edmonds during his visit
to Poynter’s campus. (Endowed by the late Nelson Poynter in the 1970s, the Poynter Instituteruns journalism
education programs, does much journalism research, and also publishes the St.
Petersburg Times.) Edmonds is a
media business analyst for Poynter and he co-authors its excellent annual State of the News Mediareport.
So he’s fairly influential. You can see why Goldstein might want to tell him
all about the woes of Canadian media, or at least his (or his latest client’s) version
of them.

And what a tale of woe Goldstein spun. Postmedia Network, the
consortium of mostly U.S. hedge funds that took over the former Southam dailies
after Canwest went bankrupt, has been dealt a “nasty” hand. A faltering economy
and falling Canadian dollar have made it tough on the company because its enormous
debt is payable in U.S. dollars. No mention of that fact that much of its
high-interest debt is held by those very same U.S. owners, plus a Canadian
hedge fund that financed most of Postmedia’s $316-million purchase of 175
newspapers from Sun Media. These hedge funds are sucking the company dry as a result, all the while
complaining about how tough times are.

According to the headline on Edmonds’
account of what Goldstein told him,“business model woes are running off the charts” up here as far as media
companies are concerned. Things are so bad for Postmedia that it has been
forced to implement “waves of layoffs and consolidations, some of the most
draconian this January.” No mention of the contentious newsroom mergers at its
dailies in Vancouver, Calgary,
Edmonton, and Ottawa,
which have now prompted federal hearings. No, the way Edmonds understood it from Goldstein, the newsrooms in those
cities were “nearly halved and asked to produce separate reports for the two
titles Postmedia owns in each market.” Well, that sounds a lot better than newsrooms
being merged.

Government, according to what Goldstein told Edmonds,
is a “complicating factor” in Canadian media, what with the state-owned broadcaster CBC
providing competition for the private sector. “And a Competition Bureau
regularly considers whether to rein in concentration at the biggest chains.”
Yeah, then it lies down until the feeling passes. Some complication.

This promotion of the woes besetting newspapers in Canada
is nothing new for Goldstein. Last summer, mere weeks before after Postmedia bought
the Sun Media dailies (surely just a coincidence), Goldstein issued a dire warning. By simply projecting current
trends to continue downward (which rarely happens), he predicted that within a
decade “there will be few, if any, printed daily newspapers” left in Canada.
Edmonds also picked up on that “expert” forecast. Except that such predictions were rampant in the U.S.
following the collapse of newspaper classified advertising there during the
2007-09 recession. Among major dailies, only a flagging few folded. No major
newspaper in North America has ceased publication since
2009 despite all the dire predictions, as I chronicle in my 2014 book Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers.The biggest threat is not so much to newspapers, which from the company
financials I have examined are still profitable. The threat is to companies
like Postmedia which own newspapers but are heavily loaded with debt which they may soon have
problems paying off if their revenues keep falling. Newspapers are remarkably
resilient, as has been amply demonstrated,
because they can quickly downsize by cutting staff and other costs. They will
thus continue publishing. They may have different owners, however. In the case of
Postmedia, that would be a blessing.

But wait, it gets better . . . I mean worse. Things are just as bad in Canadian television, according to what
Goldstein told Edmonds. “TV
stations in Canada
are in roughly the same bad shape as newspapers. . . . Canadian local
stations don’t have the saving grace of huge political advertising revenues and
rising retransmission fees, which have kept TV so prosperous here.” No, we
actually didn’t have a federal election last fall, with lots of advertising on
TV. And remember those retransmission fees, which the networks campaigned so
hard a few years ago to get the government to force the cable and satellite
companies to pay them? As I chronicle in this article, it took the networks several tries, and a
barrage of “Save Local TV” commercials, to get the right to negotiate
retransmission fees. They sang the blues, claiming they were losing hundreds of
millions of dollars, except that they weren’t, as one enterprising blogger discovered. But almost as soon as they won the war, the networks were taken over by those
very same cable and satellite companies that were making even more money than
the networks. This is the disastrous legacy of convergence, which 16 years ago saw
newspaper and television companies frantically partner in a fruitless quest for
ever-greater profits. Since it all collapsed, CTV is now owned by Bell,
Global by Shaw, and CITY by Rogers.

But here’s my favorite line from Edmonds’ account of his meeting with Canada’s
media guru. “Goldstein told me that the four private stations in his home town
of Winnipeg have collectively lost
money each of the last nine years.” I think this one proves the old saw about
how to lie with statistics. I am surprised to hear that there are four private
stations in Winnipeg, as we only
have three private networks, so I suspect there is a cable access channel in there bringing down the average. If you instead prefer hard data, as I do, luckily
the CRTC keeps a close eye on broadcasting company financials. You will see
from its latest annual monitoring report that the television networks are doing
quite nicely.

So, keep it up Ken. You’re doing a great job of twisting the
facts to the advantage of Canada’s
bloated media companies. Good thing nobody’s watching.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

I have been nominated by Terence Corcoran for an award he
calls the Most Pompously Wrongheaded Argument for a Government Bailout of the
Newspaper Industry. My nomination cannot stand, however, because I am actually
opposed to government subsidies for Canada's
press. Mr. Corcoran quoted me from a CBC panel discussion as pointing
out that Scandinavian countries are highly ranked for press freedom despite
subsidizing their press, but he ignored the following quote: “I have to agree
with Lorne [Gunter], that most self-respecting journalists would not want to
see government funding.” Mr. Corcoran is also incorrect when he states that the
1969 Davey commission on the media proposed a Press Ownership Review Board that
would have issued licences and guidelines. The Davey report made no mention of
licensing, which is anathema to press freedom. The proposed Press Ownership
Review Board, similar to one in the United
Kingdom, was to approve – or, more likely,
disapprove – newspaper sales or mergers. Such a board’s basic guideline,
according to the report, would have been that “all transactions that increase
concentration of ownership in the mass media are undesirable and contrary to
the public interest – unless shown to be otherwise.” Mr. Corcoran’s opinions
might carry more weight if he could get his facts straight.

This was predictable once the
Competition Bureau rubber-stamped Postmedia Network’s $316-million takeover of
Sun Media last year. As a result, Postmedia now publishes 37.4 per cent of
Canadian daily newspaper circulation, according to my calculations.

It is in the three westernmost
provinces, however, where its grip is truly unprecedented. In B.C., Alberta
and Saskatchewan, it now owns
eight of the nine largest dailies and accounts for a whopping 75.4 per cent of
daily newspaper circulation. It owns both daily newspapers in Calgary,
Edmonton and Ottawa,
as it already did in Vancouver.

In all four cities, newsrooms
will be merged. Residents of these burghs should be outraged, as should all
Canadians who cherish what little remains of journalistic independence in this
country. Not to mention those who put any value on promises made.

The immediate angle that
emanated from certain journalistic quarters in response to this news was a
hand-wringing wail that it was only more evidence that newspapers are
dying.

Nothing could be further from
the truth, as I explain in my recent book, Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth
of the Death of Newspapers. A quick glance at Postmedia’s latest financial
statement shows it recorded operating income of $42.5 million on
revenues of $251 million in the first quarter of its 2015-16 fiscal year, for a
very healthy profit margin of 16.9 per cent.

The self-serving myth that
newspapers are dying is one that publishers have promoted to advantage for
decades. It was used with great success in the U.S.
after the Supreme Court ruled illegal in 1965 the increasingly popular “joint
operating agreements” between newspapers that went into business together, set
advertising and subscription rates jointly and split the profits.

Newspapers lobbied furiously
for an exemption from U.S.
antitrust laws after the Supreme Court ruling, claiming that under the
prevailing natural monopoly theory of newspapers there would otherwise be only
one daily eventually left in each city. The result was the Newspaper
Preservation Act of 1970, which sanctified newspaper marriages, but only if
they maintained journalistic competition by keeping separate newsrooms.

In Canada,
joint operating agreements sprang up on the west coast in the 1950s. The Victoria
Times and The Colonist amalgamated mechanical operations in the
early 1950s, but kept separate newsrooms until the newspapers were merged by
Thomson in 1980. After the Vancouver Sun and
the DailyProvince combined
non-editorial operations in 1957, however, the Restrictive Trade Practices
Commission ruled the merger an illegal combination between competitors, as I
document in my 2001 bookPacific Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver’s
Newspaper Monopoly.

The owners of the Sun and Province,
however, pointed to the closure on both sides of the border of smaller, weaker
newspapers as evidence that newspapers were dying, and they were allowed to go
into business together. The Restrictive Trade Practices Commission made them
promise to keep separate newsrooms forever, which now seems to have been
officially forgotten.

The events of “Black
Wednesday,” which saw the Ottawa Journal and the Winnipeg
Tribune close on August 27, 1980, prompting a Royal Commission on
Newspapers, was proof positive to many of the natural monopoly theory of newspapers.

The 1981 Royal Commission
report pointed to the rising tide of ownership concentration, as had a 1970
Senate report on mass media. Both urged measures to stem the inexorable
economic forces that drove industry consolidation, but nothing was ever done.

The Senate report recommended a
Press Ownership Review Board to oversee changes in ownership, along with
government subsidies to encourage a competing bare-bones “Volkswagen press.”
The Royal Commission urged limits on chain ownership of newspapers, but none
were enacted as the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau was replaced by the
Progressive Conservatives of Brian Mulroney.

But then a funny thing happened
in those two cities and others where only one newspaper remained. Colorful
tabloids, modeled after the wildly successful Toronto
Sun, sprang up as competition to monopoly broadsheets in Ottawa,
Winnipeg and Edmonton. Soon
there was an entire chain of tabloids Suns across Canada.
Even staid old Southam converted its dowdy old VancouverProvince to tabloid format in
1983 to stave off extinction, and it thrived with a younger readership, which
in turn attracted advertisers trying to sell to that valued demographic.

When Postmedia bought the Sun
Media chain in late 2014, CEO Paul Godfrey promised it
would continue to operate independently with its own newsrooms and opinions. He repeated
the promise after the Competition Bureau approved the purchase in
early 2015. By the time the Sun Media takeover was completed a few weeks later,
however, the promise had been softened. Postmedia’s senior vice president of
content, Lou Clancy, said
then that some writers may be shared between the chains, but that the
“Suns and Postmedia broadsheets would compete with each other.”

I guess it just shows the value
of promises where hedge funds are concerned.

Marc Edge is a professor of
media and communication at University Canada West in Vancouver.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

If you're looking for a villain in the latest crisis of
Canadian journalism, don't blame Postmedia Network. It's just doing what comes
naturally to a bottom-line corporation that is mostly owned by U.S.
hedge funds that are bleeding it (and Canadian journalism) dry with
high-interest loans, which they also largely hold. Postmedia is just trying to
do what it thinks it can get away with to fatten the bottom line and feed its
rapacious owners.

If you want to point fingers, look no farther than the
federal Competition
Bureau, the regulatory body that keeps letting them get away with it. The
bureau, according to its website,
is ''an independent law enforcement agency'' that is supposed to ensure that
''Canadian businesses and consumers prosper in a competitive and innovative
marketplace.''

Worried about the future of Canadian media? Understand who's made the decisions.

It is knee-deep in complicity when it comes to the sorry
state of Canada's
news media, in particular for ''foolishly''
rubber-stamping Postmedia's $316-million purchase of
175 Sun Media newspapers last year without even the need for hearings. This was
effectively the takeover of the country's second-largest newspaper chain by its
largest (seller Quebecor retained three French-language tabloids), yet it was
adjudicated in secret by the Competition Bureau. Not only that, but after it
announced that its economic analysis absurdly concluded that
the two newspapers Postmedia now owns in Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa didn't
compete anyway, the bureau refused my request for a copy of this
taxpayer-funded research.

Once it got the green light for its takeover, Postmedia's announcement on
Tuesday that it was merging its newsrooms and eliminating 90 jobs in those
cities was predictable. The shocker is that it would try the same thing in Vancouver.
When the Vancouver Sun and
theDailyProvince formed
a partnership in 1957, the Competition Bureau's predecessor, the Restrictive
Trade Practices Commission, held hearings in both Ottawa
and Vancouver.

As I document in my 2001 book Pacific Press: The
Unauthorized Story of Vancouver's Newspaper Monopoly, the RTPC
declared the merger an illegal combination between competitors. The Sun and Province argued
that if they weren't allowed to go into business together, under the peculiar
economics of the industry there would eventually be only one newspaper left in Vancouver.
That ignored the fact there were then three, but Pacific Press bought the morning Herald from Thomson Newspapers and
quickly folded it. Oh, all right then, responded the RTPC,
go ahead and merge, but make sure you keep separate newsrooms forever and ever.
It was a small price Pacific Press was forced to pay for its lucrative new
monopoly. Well, so much for that.

Competition 'virtually dead'

The Restrictive Trade Practices Commission published its
findings in book
form in 1960. A Special Senate Committee on Mass Media held hearings
and published three thick volumes a decade later. ''There are only five cities
in the country where genuine competition between newspapers exists,'' it noted in
fruitlessly recommending a Press Ownership Review Board to slow consolidation.

A decade after that, when dailies folded in Ottawa
and Winnipeg on the same day, the
first Prime Minister Trudeau quickly convened a Royal Commission on Newspapers
to investigate. It held hearings across the country and published a report that
was accompanied by no fewer than eight book-length research studies.
''Newspaper competition, of the kind that used to be, is virtually dead in Canada,''
its report noted. ''This ought not to have been allowed to happen.'' It
recommended limiting newspaper ownership to five dailies per chain, but a
proposed Canada Newspaper Act was never tabled in Parliament as the government
changed from Liberal to Progressive Conservative.

A 2006 Senate report on Canadian news media was sharply
critical of the Competition Bureau, which succeeded the RTPC in the mid-1980s,
for failing to prevent our stratospheric level of press ownership
concentration. It accused the Competition Bureau of nothing short of ''neglect''
for failing to halt press consolidation. ''One challenge is the complete
absence of a review mechanism to consider the public interest in news media
mergers,'' it noted. ''The result has been extremely high levels of news media
concentration in particular cities or regions.''

It recommended a new section for the Competition Act to deal
with news media mergers and prevent corporate dominance in any market. As the
Competition Bureau was unlikely to have the expertise to deal with such
mergers, it recommended an expert panel conduct the review. Election of an
ardently deregulationist Harper government that year, however, doomed the
recommendations.

Still profitable, but for whom?

Postmedia, of course, argues that it now has to compete with
the Internet. Yes, and it now owns Sun Media's canoe.ca news website in
addition to its own Canada.com, giving it two of the country's largest online
news operations. That is in addition to its 37.6 per cent share of paid daily
newspaper circulation in Canada,
by my calculations, including 75.4 per cent in the three westernmost provinces,
where it now owns eight of the nine largest dailies.

But newspapers, they will add, are facing tough times. Sure,
but as I document in my 2014 book Greatly
Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers, they are still mostly making
double-digit profit margins. Its latest quarterly
report shows that Postmedia made a healthy 16.9 per cent return on
revenue from September to November, with earnings of $42.5 million on revenues
of $251 million.

But it's funny how things change. The incoming Trudeau
government now has the opportunity to halt the madness. Or it can sit back and
watch as one giant media corporation consolidates almost all of the country's
remaining press competition.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

The Literary Review of Canada has published a review by Carleton University professor Christopher Waddell of my book that is complimentary but disagrees with my conclusion that
newspapers will survive their current downsizing. “Greatly Exaggerated is a
well-researched and well-explained story of how the newspaper business changed
in the second half of the 20th and into the 21st century,” he writes. “Edge is
correct that newspapers have survived and, despite the predictions of their
imminent demise, have made a profit on their operations.” While agreeing with my findings of fact, however, Waddell comes to the opposite conclusion. Their ability to consistently
generate profits despite plummeting revenues, he writes, does not necessarily ensure the
survival of newspapers.

That
hardly guarantees them a long future. Complacently extending Edge’s story into
the near future is a recipe for disillusionment. In fact, what is greatly
exaggerated is just the short time frame for the death of newspapers, not the
end result.

While Waddell’s review, which is the LRC’s cover story for its May issue, is
available on its website, the reply its editor Mark Lovewell invited me to
write is not. [Edit: It now is.] That’s why I am posting it on this blog.

The past, as Christopher Waddell observes, is an imperfect
guide to the future. Understanding what happened in the past and why, however, is
the best guide we have to what will happen in the future, because it aids in
understanding the present and the processes that shaped it and will likely
continue to shape the future. The economics of newspapers, which are incredibly
arcane, must also be understood before their fate can be foreseen. Because of
their unique “dual market” nature, they sell their product to consumers at a
fraction of its cost to produce, which is subsidized by advertisers. With the
enormous post-war bubble in advertising, newspapers came to rely
disproportionately on advertising revenue, which by the recent financial crisis
comprised 87 percent of their total revenues in the U.S.
and 77 percent in Canada.
As newspapers rearrange their business model, readers are finding they now have
to pay higher hard copy prices and increasingly also have to pay for online
access.

Professor Waddell argues that recent job cuts have led to an
emaciated print product for which many do not care to pay more. A vicious
circle caused by cuts, he argues, leads to defections by both readers and
advertisers. This seems a chicken-egg argument, as it was the defection of
readers and advertisers that first prompted cuts. Their demonstrated ability to
downsize, however, is one of the things that will save newspapers. In the lingo
of techies, they are scalable, or easily made larger or smaller. Luckily, as
Professor Waddell notes, newspapers seem to have finally caught on to what it
is that readers want and cannot get elsewhere, which is local news coverage.

His other argument is that young people don’t read
newspapers and have found other online sources of news, so the supply of
newspaper readers will eventually dry up. Young people have never taken much
interest in the news, however, at least not in the type of news that newspapers
tend to cover. It is only when they grow up, get married, take out mortgages,
and start families that they start to wonder about things like schools, taxes,
politics, and the economy. Newspapers are still by far the largest
newsgathering organizations in their communities. The widespread implementation
of paywalls, which is the other thing that will save newspapers, means that if
people want the news that newspapers provide (and they do), they will have to
pay for it, one way or the other.